OK another question i set up and machine with Linux server, and what i want to do is use it as a VERY simple file server for my home network. Heres where i am so far....i have made a directory under the /root login and have made it shared. I have 4 XP machines on the home network and i want all user of the xp machine to be able to gain access to the root directory that i made. read and write access. i can see the samba server on all machines but i need to know how to make it where the is no pass word needed ... i am new to linux and i dont want to make my fustrations trash my project....ANY HELP WOULD BE AWSOME

First ... please don't double post (put the same post in multiple sections of the forum....I removed your other post from Tips & Tricks)

We may move this post to Tips & Tricks later....-------------------------------You do not want to create the directory under /root ... /root is the root users home directory and not where you want to put anything that is accessed by all users.

What is your distro of Linux?

The easiest thing to do (that is also somewhat secure) is this .... create users in linux for all the users on your WinXp machines (that have usernames in XP) ... if you don't know your username in WinXP, then at the WinXP command prompt type this command (followed by enter):

echo %USERNAME%

The username and password for each user on WinXp needs to be the same on each XP machine (ie, if username bill has access to 2 machines ... his username should be bill on each and his password should be the same on each)...you would then create a user in Linux for Bill (called bill) using the same password he has in WinXP.

You also need to create a group in Linux named samba and make each of your new users a member of the new samba group. How you do this depends on your linux distro....

Now you need a directory to share stuff in ... I would recommed /home/samba ... so do this (as root from a command terminal):

mkdir /home/samba

now we will assign the group samba as the group of this directory (make sure you have already created the samba group....)

chown -R root:samba /home/samba

now we need to change the permissions so that all members of the samba group have full privs to write to the new shared folder ....

chmod 775 /home/samba

now let's check our work ....

ls -al /home | grep samba

it should return something that looks like this:

CODE

drwxrwxr-x 2 root samba 4096 Mar 16 05:37 samba

[the date might be different ... the important parts are that the permissions are drwxrwxr-x and the group is samba (the position between root and filesize {in this case 4096} is group].